Just thinking out loud really, but it's another of those “Why Not?” sort of statements. Yeah, I do those from time to time...

This feels like a possibility because Microsoft has already demonstrated a fondness for packaging the Vista OS in every conceivable way, from Home Basic to Ultimate. Their marketing team is out of control and the sheer number of Vista packages on the shelf at your local computer store is proof-positive of this.

So What to the Boys in Marketing See?

The continuing rise in the sales of the MacBook (at least within North America) means there is a growing market for boutique PCs that sport few variation on hardware configurations that the Windows team could make good use of, producing a Windows kernel that is tailor-made for running on Macbooks.

This is not such a bad line of work to pursue since there's a) a market, and b) the future MinWin kernel is to make specialized editions of Windows more probable through its modularity support... so why not a kernel of Macbook optimized modules.

Keeping it Simple

At the very least it could settle the presumption by Windows apologists that the Mac OS works so well because the hardware variations are so limited that Apple doesn't need to produce a swiss-army-knife of an OS like Windows. That is, if M$ did the same by producing a Mac edition of Windows they too could tailor their kernel to only work with the drivers necessary to operate a Mac. Heck, maybe even leave out the option to install drivers to alternate hardware (i.e. why leave in code to replace the ATI video card with an Nvidia card? It's not even supported within the hardware so there's no need for support to change it).

Embedded software engineers have been making good use of this practice the days of the old Atari 2600. Hey, we always write better software when we get control over the largest possible set of variables. Hardware is possibly the most visible and significant issue any programmer deals with.

Tags: windows, apple, windows7